It’s that time again: Pride Month. This year I am celebrating with fellow members of The Hand Bookbinders of California (HBC) at the San Francisco Opera House. No, I’m not in the pit (nor on stage) — that is my beloved wife’s bailiwick. Please join a few book artists for a pre-concert talk before the Pride Concert and view our book Castro District Pride flag book works.

Insiya Dhatt, a creative and accomplished book artist, lives in the Castro neighborhood. She liaised with the Castro Merchants Association’s on behalf of our organization to receive a decommissioned Pride flag that had soared over Harvey Milk Plaza in the heart of the Castro. Touchingly, the flag had been raised on the day of Dianne Feinstein’s death. A handful of HBC members carefully divided the 20 x 30 foot flag into sections and distributed them about 20 HBC members. Each participant was invited to transform this fabric into a book object. We wrote about the project’s background and created an exhibition page for the finished book works. The American Bookbinding Museum hosted HBC’s 53rd Exhibition, which included fine bindings, two set books, and the upcycled Pride flag books.

I was an artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, which opened its giant doors to me as I wrangled with the present moment and history. Instead of creating a nostalgic book work about the 1987 Gay Pride March in Washington DC, which is when the AIDS Memorial Quilt was unveiled, I pivoted toward creating something to help me reckon with the Orwellian backdrop of the 47th president’s sickening executive orders.

My blurb about A Timeline of LGBTQ History:

“The day Dianne Feinstein passed away is the day that this flag started flying.” 
~ Kerry Asten Bennett, President of Castro Merchants Association & Proprietor of Cliff’s Variety

I intended to upcycle 35 mm images that I had shot during the unveiling of the NAMES Quilt at the 1987 Pride March in Washington DC. While devising a structure for these images using a 240-inch slice of the flag, I read that the newly sworn-in US President made the Orwellian proclamation that the gender spectrum no longer exists. In an effort to comprehend this moment in history, I looked to a chronicle of LGBTQ history; this ~240-inch slice of the Castro flag documents traces of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, and queer existence from c. 9600 BCE – 1795 CE.

COLOPHON
Wikipedia’s page, Timeline of LGBTQ history, (accessed January 31st, 2025 — the date the U.S. President directed the federal Department of Health and Human Services and its agencies to purge its websites of data on and information about LGBTQ+ rights, gender dysphoria, and HIV).

The scroll’s segments were printed on Awagami Factory Inbe paper using Secret Service Typewriter typeface and adhered to the flag with Gudy 831 Fine Art Mounting Adhesive.